History

Virtual Iron officials believe the certification is important to many of it s users because they because increasingly have been looking for transparent virtualization capabilities that work across the breadth of their datacenters and so need applications like DB2 for Linux to work and play well in a virtualized environment.

“Early customers are beginning to move their business applications to the Virtutal Iron solution so we are pretty pleased that customers running DB2 can use our product knowing this designation ensures full interoperability between DB2 and VFe,” said John Thibault, Virtual Iron’s President and CEO.

VMware Platinum Support is designed with mission critical applications and production environments in mind. This service should be considered for any 7×24 operation or production environment where little or no downtime can be tolerated. With the new level of service you will experience the benefits below:

The package is designed for small-midsize businesses that want the functionality of OpenView, but in a simpler, cheaper package. HP says that it is targeting SMBs and departments of large enterprises.

Pricing for the bundle, which covers 20 servers, plus a choice of one “smart plug-in” for the Oracle database, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL Server, Active Directory, or Microsoft Virtual Server, retails for $17,995, available immediately. Other plug-ins can be purchased for $1,000 – $2,000 apiece and a one-time upgrade to add 10 servers (to 30 in total) is also available.

HP is counting on the reputation of OpenView to sell the product. “The difference is this is based on experience with UNIX product, which has proven scalability,” said Andy Smith, solution marketing manager for HP.

However, by design, the new package is designed not to be scalable. That’s because HP has had to walk a bit of a tightrope here, since it doesn’t want to cannibalize the existing OpenView corporate market by allowing large clients to simply stock up in a bunch of Limited Editions.

While server virtualization can require more capacity and virtualization on the storage side, the technologies remain distinct. VMware software partitions Intel-based servers into separate virtual machines that run applications separately. Storage virtualization pools data to make it easier to manage.

Still, when EMC acquired VMware in December of 2003, the expectation was that it would eventually integrate server virtualization into its storage products. EMC has not met that expectation.

This doesn’t mean EMC isn’t high on VMware. CEO Joe Tucci kicked off EMC?s annual Tech Summit on Monday by singing the praises of server virtualization. Tucci pointed out that VMware generated $218 million in revenue last year, and said he expected a run rate of nearly $400 million in 2005 after a strong first quarter.

?Server virtualization is here today, and very primetime in 2005,? Tucci said. ?I don?t think we?ll see a lot of revenues from storage virtualization this year. Server virtualization, yes. Storage virtualization, no.?

Unlike the other companies EMC bought during its $3.5 billion 2003 shopping spree — Documentum and Legato — and companies it has acquired since then, EMC runs VMware as a separate division apart from its software group. It has refrained from integrating its technology or business into its storage software.

Now would seem like the ideal time for a matchup, considering EMC?s big push into storage virtualization with Invista. Yet it appears EMC purchased VMware more for its business value than to integrate its technology into storage products, and business reasons dictate keeping VMware technology separate.

For one thing, VMware is sold largely through server companies such as Dell Inc. (Nasdaq: DELL – message board), Hewlett-Packard Co., and IBM Corp.. HP and IBM are also EMC storage rivals and would balk at EMC using the VMware technology for competitive storage advantage. Better for EMC to use their valuable channels than to risk animosity in a market it doesn’t dominate.

Howard Elias, EMC?s executive VP for corporate marketing, says EMC might do limited integration of VMware technology in storage — such as using virtual machines in conjunction with its SRDF replication software for failover. It would also make the same capabilities available to IBM and HP, he says.

If EMC integrates VMware and Invista at all, Elias says it would allow IBM and HP to integrate their storage virtualization products (including IBM’s SAN Volume Controller) as well.

In several keynotes and press meetings this week, officials of the Hopkinton, Mass.-based storage giant said the need to safely and cost effectively archive and retrieve data requires both a way to virtualize storage resources to make them easily accessible to different applications, and a tiered approach to migrate data based on its value.

Jeffrey Nick, senior vice president and CTO of EMC, said that customers are looking to build a strategy for ILM, and need a framework into which ILM can be plugged. “In order for ILM to be understood and adopted, customers are being asked, how does it fit with other dimensions of IT,” he said.

EMC is focused on tightly coordinating the components of its ILM strategy with technology that supports data migration, protection and security, said Nick. This includes its Documentum enterprise content management, VMware server virtualization, and its new Invista storage virtualization, he said. It also includes the Smarts application-based storage management technology the company recently acquired.

“If we bring storage management capabilities, orchestrate them with an application-oriented view of the storage topology, the ability to manage resources like VMware and Invista do, and traditional enterprise content management capabilities, then ILM really starts to take shape,” he said. “Then I can do intelligent data placement based on network information from Smarts, document information from Documentum, and decide where to place it based on the value of the data to the business.”

By tying these technologies together, customers will be able to understand how their IT resources are being consumed, which applications are being served, and how their data is being processed. “They can then start to build out intelligent, automated ILM,” he said.

Storage virtualization will in the near future make it possible to automatically move data to different levels of storage, whether part of an ILM strategy or in order to do software patches or technology refreshes, in a non-disruptive manner, said Mark Lewis, executive vice president and chief development officer for EMC.

Mark Lewis, executive vice president and chief development officer of EMC, told over 4,000 end-users and partners attending the EMC Technology Summit in New Orleans that its new Invista virtualization solution, previously known as the Storage Router, will be available next quarter to Global 2000 enterprises initially on a direct sales-only basis.

EMC is building specialty teams to take the appliance to market, as it takes time to show the proof-of-concept to customers, Lewis said. “This gives us time to refine it and get it ready for a roll-out to more of a mass market,” he said.

Invista fits EMC’s belief that virtualization must above all separate the hardware from the software, Lewis said. Storage management is more independent when hardware, software, storage volumes and applications are their own silos. “It allows a great deal of flexibility,” he said.

Invista takes advantage of new intelligence being built into SAN switches from Brocade Communication Systems, Cisco and McData to allow the dynamic mapping of applications to their required data. As the data volumes are migrated to other locations, such as during a technology refresh or according to changes in required quality of service levels, that migration does not disrupt the applications, Lewis said. Those volumes can sit on storage arrays from multiple vendors, including EMC, IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Hitachi Data Systems.

This dynamic mapping is handled by Invista Control Path Cluster modules. These modules, which are Intel CPU-based appliances, sit outside of the data path to maintain the mapping of data volumes to the applications.

Lewis contrasted EMC’s Invista to the virtualization technology of rivals such as IBM and Hitachi Data Systems, which put multi-vendor storage pools behind their own arrays. Because Invista relies on intelligence within the SAN switches, the data does not run through a separate array or appliance, and so it does not impact the performance or security of the data. With IBM and Hitachi, a separate array sits between the host and the arrays where the data is stored. “But it’s just another array,” he said.

When Invista is released next quarter, it will be initially available bundled with all necessary software and either a Brocade or Cisco switch. List price will be $225,000. Such a configuration will handle a minimum of 64 Tbytes of storage, Lewis said. A bundle with a McData switch is expected early next year.

Nicknamed the Stevies for the Greek word ?crowned,? the awards will be presented to winners at a gala dinner on Thursday, May 19 in the Sheraton New York Hotel & Towers in New York City. The ceremonies will be videocast live worldwide by Speedera Networks, and will be broadcast live on radio in the U.S.A by the Business TalkRadio Network.

In March of 2003 PlateSpin Ltd. was founded to address enterprise datacenter needs, helping datacenter managers that are faced with shrinking budgets and increased capability expectations. Now, with well over 250 customers and 60 resellers, PlateSpin is providing the world?s first fully automated server workload portability platform, which allows operating systems and their associated applications and data to be moved between physical and virtual machine server infrastructure with zero manual effort for VMware ESX Server, VMware GSX Server, and Microsoft Virtual Server 2005. This platform allows PlateSpin to offer commercial solutions that address the needs of IT server consolidation, improved business continuity and disaster planning as well as the way IT test labs are managed.

?Our recent market success and the achievement of being selected for the Best New Company Stevie Award are a result of the dedication and hard work of the team here at PlateSpin? said Stephen Pollack, PlateSpin?s CEO. ?We focus on solving real business problems in the datacenter. We do that by listening to our customers and by creating the best solutions on the market. The fact that our flagship product, PlateSpin PowerP2V was named as a finalist in the Best New Product category is a testimony to PlateSpin ingenuity and customer focus.?

Recipients of the International Stevie Award trophies were selected from more than 600 nominations received from companies and individuals in more than 30 countries. Twenty-one nations have at least one International Stevie winner each, including Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Croatia, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Korea, Nigeria, Pakistan, Spain, Sweden, Thailand, United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, and the U.S.A.

IBM at the end of the month will release IBM Director Version 4.2, which focuses on extending management support to new operating system platforms, and in September IBM will release Version 5.1, a major upgrade that will enhance ease of use and simplify installation, as well as further extend the tool’s reach out to other hardware platforms, according to Rob Sauerwalt, IBM global brand manager for software and services in Research Triangle Park, N.C.

After extensively surveying customers about their requirements for the hardware management suite, IBM found that it needed “to focus on openness, ease of use, and integration,” he said.

“They surveyed thousands of people. I found that significant,” said Kelly Quinn, senior analyst at IDC in Framingham, Mass. “It is a way to determine the real drivers behind how the customer uses the product and the ways they incorporate it into their overall work process. With that feedback they can create a product that fits much better into the way the work flows through a customer’s organization,” she added.

IBM in Director Version 4.2 will add support for the Windows 64-bit operating system, VMware Inc.’s VMware GSX and the latest version of VMware ESX, as well as Red Hat Inc.’s Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.0.

IBM will address integration issues with the release in June or July of an SDK (software development kit) that allows third-party tools providers to integrate their management products with the IBM Director. That would allow users to maintain their investment in existing third-party tools such as imaging products, but reduce the complexity associated with multiple management tools on different platforms and providing different user interfaces. “So if customers have already standardized on Altiris for deployment, there will be an Altiris extension to Director that does deployment,” said Sauerwalt, who added that such an extension is due in September.

IBM took some core functions in the suite, including the console, a scheduler and an automation engine, and created a Remote Deployment Manager that allows third parties to exploit those functions to integrate tools such as imaging into the suite. The new Express SDK for the Remote Deployment Manager will provide programmatic interfaces for such integration. The suite also provides inventory update, resource monitoring and alerting, as well as capacity planning.

For ease of installation and use, Director 5.1 will add a new user interface option that is more in line with the familiar Windows UI and incorporate “wizards” that will reduce the number of steps required to configure the Director for functions such as image deployment.

For further hardware support, Director 5.1 will be able to manage server hardware from Dell Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co. The Director, made up of a user console, agent and management server, will for the first time in Verson 5.1 be able to “manage any IBM system from any IBM system,” said Sauerwalt. “And 5.1 will ship with every server IBM builds,” he added. That includes the IBM eServer zSeries, iSeries, pSeries and xSeries.